ASK THE HEADHUNTER by Nick Corcodilos

HOW CAN A RECRUITER FIND THE BEST CANDIDATES?

Q: I am an independent recruiter looking for strong job candidates. What should I do other than refer to purchased lists of industry people? I also need advice about putting the right "corporate words" in candidates' profiles. This is the cover page that I send to my client companies along with each candidate's resume. You can only say "strong leadership skills" and "team player" so many times. Any suggestions?

NICK'S REPLY

I conducted a workshop for 40 internal recruiters at a major company, and they asked pretty much the same questions. Here's what I told them. (The first suggestion is for headhunters and a company's internal recruiters. The second could also be helpful to savvy managers who do their own recruiting.)

Forget buzzwords. Learn what each manager needs. As you point out, jargon isn't effective. The best way to present your candidates is to get to know the employers better and to do your pitch on the phone or in person. You need to learn a manager's business from the inside out. Then you'll know what kinds of candidates to present and what the hot buttons are for that manager. There's no faking it and, as you've learned, those buzzwords wear out quickly. This takes time and effort, but there's no replacement for knowing what your clients need.

Become an active participant in your professional community. Get to know the key people in the industry you recruit for. Join and participate actively in professional associations. Read relevant trade publications, attend training courses your "targets" go to, and be known as the insider to call for the scoop on the business. That's a challenge, but it's the only way to be a great headhunter (and a great manager). Give the people you want to recruit good reasons to come to you first.

Recruiting is not an armchair business. The only way to get better at it is to do it more actively. (I hope that job hunters reading this will find some good ideas about job hunting in between the lines.)

---

THE HEADHUNTER TIP

You need just one yes.

The news about jobs is discouraging. Don't let it influence your job-hunting efforts. Ignore the economy and jobless claims, or you're doomed. You don't need one of the thousands of jobs that went poof last month and left someone on unemployment. You need just one job that you can do profitably for one good company.

When I started headhunting, the woman who hired me said this: "Your job is to find great workers for our client companies and to add new companies to our roster. You will consider a lot of prospects. You will be told no every hour of the day, every day of the week. You will hear no all the time. You need just one or two yeses to be successful."

That goes double for job hunters. The jobs are in the companies that drive the economy, in companies that manage for the upturn. And they're hiring.

---

COMMENTARY

It's always interesting when someone comes up with a new approach to recruiting. Imagine getting paid to go on a job interview. Clever, eh?

It's something being tried by some recruiting firms.

Help me work through the logic. The idea is that the best workers are so busy at their jobs that they probably don't read job listings or post their resumes online. That makes sense to me. So these recruiting firms are trying to help employers attract such people. Companies would offer money to these "hidden job hunters" to get them into job interviews.

So far, it's interesting. Hard-to-find candidates fill out a form about themselves so the process can get started. But that's where we hit the wall.

If these folks are not out looking for jobs, why would they sign up? To make a few bucks on the chance that a company will invite them for an interview? Well ... you've got to get them to sign up first. The best people, that is.

Here's the first problem. Who is most likely to sign up for such a service? I think it's people whose resumes are already plastered all over the Net. So what does this clever recruiting method accomplish? It makes it easier for busy people in human resources departments to spend more money reviewing applicants whose resumes are already freely available.

It seems to me that all these "pay to interview" firms are doing is creating a new job -- interviewing. A job hunter could earn some nice change doing this, without any intention of accepting a job. The challenge becomes gaming the system, not getting a job. Employers wind up interviewing the wrong people -- not the best ones.

The second problem is that employers will never buy into this on any scale because they're already spending their recruiting budgets on job boards. For a fee, job boards deliver tens of thousands of resumes for human resources departments to process. These applicant-processing systems depend on masses of incoming resumes. No decision has to be made about which resumes to pay for because the employer is buying applicants in bulk. That's an easy decision (even if it's not a smart one). Paying to talk to just one candidate creates pressure that personnel managers are just not accustomed to.

But the main problem with this "pay to interview" model is that it implies something it cannot deliver. The idea that the best candidates are those who will take money to interview just doesn't make any sense.

I'd suggest that companies spend their money another way: Pay managers to find good candidates themselves. Or reward your company's employees to refer great candidates.

Most companies already have such systems in place. They just don't use them effectively. They're called employee referral programs. With these, at least a company knows where the applicants are coming from and a payout is made only if the candidate is actually hired.

Finally, there is an inherent conflict in paying for interviews: a selection bias. Will employers hire candidates they've paid just to rationalize the money they've spent? I'd love to see how "pay to interview" works out -- and whether the quality of interviews goes up. If you've seen a news update, please let me know.

---

Write to Nick at P.O. Box 600, Lebanon, NJ 08833 or www.asktheheadhunter.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 NICK CORCODILOS